I Know What I'm Doing (35 page)

The next morning, I got on the Manhattan-bound F train after being laughed at by Amy for asking whether it was safe to carry a purse into New York City. I got off at Second Avenue and found my way to my mecca—the Luna Lounge. It was empty and I went up and confidently said to the bartender, “I want to perform at the alternative comedy show I read about in the
Village Voice
.”

He shrugged. “I don’t book it. You have to send a tape.”

I was confused. “A tape of what?”

“A tape of you doing stand-up.”

Now I was indignant. “But I have never done stand-up. I don’t have a tape yet. I’m trying to start so I want to start here.”

We went back and forth for a while—as I tried to convince him that I just knew I was funny and he tried to convince me that he had no power to get me on that stage. Imagine going to a job interview, refusing to bring a résumé or any references, and wanting to get hired on the promise that you’ll do a really, really good job if they’d just hire you. I sat down at the bar, defeated. But then I realized,
Hey, I’m an adult. In New York City. I can have a drink in the daytime if I want
and
smoke a cigarette.
I ordered a beer and bummed a Merit Ultra Light off the bartender. I posed for the imaginary camera that was taking my James Dean–esque photo. I’d gotten what I wanted out of New York City and after only four days, I knew it was time to go home.

BACK IN BOSTON, things felt weird with Blake. I couldn’t believe that four whole days spent in a long-distance relationship hadn’t made him change his mind about not wanting to live with me. He said I could stay with him until I found an apartment. I did find an apartment. His apartment. And like a lost puppy, I stayed for almost a year. I got my old job back at the Boston Ballet and my old position back on the “team” at Improv Boston. I was disheartened at the thought of starting a stand-up career because it seemed like you couldn’t start until you had already started and put it on tape. So I postponed that dream and focused on being Blake’s clingy girlfriend.

As the months passed, the only thing tangled up in Blake’s sheets was Blake. I was on the other side of the futon, shivering, struggling to get under the covers with him. Blake had made a new friend in his acting class, a female friend. She was starring in the college production of
The Diary of Anne Frank.
Blake lit up when he talked about her, and he talked about her a lot. He also talked
to
her a lot, on the phone, in his room, while I sat on his bed, watching. I got drunk one night at a party and confronted him in front of God and a kitchenful of his peers and screamed, “Are you fucking her?” He wasn’t fucking her—until his girlfriend got drunk and crazy and screamed, “Are you fucking her?” And then that night, I’m pretty sure he fucked her, because he didn’t come home. The next day we broke up.

I know it’s wrong, and if I end up going to hell and meeting Adolf Hitler, I promise that I will kill him with my bare hands, but to this day when someone brings up
The Diary of Anne Frank,
I can’t help but think to myself,
That little whore.

My relationship with my parents had improved over that year. Somehow living with Blake wasn’t as abhorrent to my folks as spending the night with Blake and then coming home the next morning in the same clothes in which I’d left their house—to see my boyfriend, who was planning to take those clothes right off. My mom and I sat
at the kitchen table, where she’d referred to me as a “trash bag” just a year before. We were having our first frank discussion about sex, without actually talking about sex. Actually, we’d talked about sex once—in 1985.

In fifth-grade sex ed class, my teacher taught us what happens when sperm enters a woman’s fallopian tubes. Our homework assignment was to draw a picture of the opposite sex—or what we thought the opposite sex looked like naked. Then we were to write a paragraph underneath, from our best understanding, of what intercourse was and how babies were made. I told my mom about the homework assignment and she teased me by chasing me around the kitchen table, asking to see what I’d drawn. I remember feeling disappointed in sex ed class. I’d had a vague inkling that sex was something that people did for fun, but the way it was being taught, it seemed like the teacher was dismissing that notion and instead presenting sex as something that two people do only when they want to make a baby. I half listened to the teacher explain how sperm meets egg, figuring,
I don’t need to know this. I don’t think I’m having kids anytime soon.

I think about raising kids now and how they’d have access to Facebook and actual real pictures of naked people on the Internet. I think about how my ten-year-old daughter would be nothing like me. I had no idea what a penis looked like, so that picture I had to draw in fifth grade of a naked man looked like a Ken doll—just legs with no anatomy in between. My ten-year-old daughter probably would already have had a dick-pic sent to her cell phone by some little shit in her class. Would my ten-year-old daughter have to have a cell phone? I guess I could forbid her from having one—just like my mom forbade me from watching MTV because she thought music videos were too sexually explicit and directed by the devil. But then again, what if my daughter had to make an emergency call? There aren’t pay phones on every corner these days. If some creep in a van were to abduct her outside of school, my daughter wouldn’t be able to speed-dial 911 or text me. I can’t send a ten-year-old girl to school
with no viable means of communication. And what if my ten-year-old girl was an early bloomer and had her period already? Would I have to teach her about safe sex or secretly slip a birth control pill into her oatmeal every morning? I know that when I was ten I was terribly horny for Bruce Willis and Michael J. Fox. Luckily, the boys at school whom I liked didn’t like me back, so my lust remained only a fantasy reserved for the hours that
Moonlighting
and
Family Ties
aired. But what about my imaginary daughter? What if the boys liked her back? Then they’d be screwing at my house after school while I was on tour doing comedy, and before you know it, I’d have a pregnant ten-year-old daughter and I’d be a grandmother
and
a mother to two people before one of them even turned eleven.

I don’t understand what’s so great about having kids when I’m faced with the fact that at some point my kids would disappoint me—just like I disappointed my parents. It’s the vicious cycle of life. It’s an absolute certainty that the babies that I’m not having would become horny teens who send pictures of their genitalia to one another on cell phones that I’m paying for.

Eleven years later, I sat around that same kitchen table with my mom as she gave her version of a mea culpa. “Jennifah, I’m reading a biography on Lauren Bacall. She had a lot of men in her life but she loved them deeply because she was passionate . . . about everything she did. She was a wond-ah-ful woman who was very talented.”

That was my mom’s way of telling me that I was forgiven and that even though she’d never slept with a man before marriage, it was something that “the kids” and Hollywood legends were doing and maybe it wasn’t so abnormal or trash bag–like after all.

She’ll never admit it, but I believe that my Catholic-but-starstruck mom gives a free pass to people in Hollywood on certain moral issues. The affair between JFK and Marilyn Monroe was blessed by my mom in ways that Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton’s affair wasn’t—and they only had oral/cigar sex! But Bill Clinton’s saxophone-playing appearance on Arsenio Hall was not enough for my mother to consider him Hollywood royalty. My mom doesn’t
condone abusing prescription drugs, but to her, Judy Garland is a saint and a victim. She’ll forever blame the movie studios for handing Judy the pills. And I remember when her best friend called to say that John Lennon had been shot—my mom said over the phone, “Oh Ruthie. It’s just not fair. A Beatle shouldn’t be allowed to die.”

As long as my mom and I were having a heart-to-heart, I summoned up the rest of my gumption and told her that I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. I knew I was killing her dream of my owning my own little local dance studio or becoming a Broadway actress. Her response was, “Are you even funny? You are very dramatic, Jennifah.” I reminded her of how I’d always wanted to be voted class clown in the Pollard Middle School yearbook. (By the way, “class clown” seemed to be the moniker given to the most humorless and bullying jocks. What class clown really means is “most popular”; the kids who grow up to be truly funny are shoved into lockers.)

AGAINST MY MOM’S wishes, I continued the pursuit of stand-up comedy, but I did live in my childhood bedroom, with no male visitors, like a good, celibate twenty-two-year-old girl. Every night I clicked and clacked on the Kirkman family word processor, attempting to write jokes.

One of my first jokes was about Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign from the 1980s. I have no idea why that was still on my mind in the 1990s. The joke was horrible. It wasn’t even a joke. It wasn’t even a complete thought. It went something like this: “Nancy Reagan says to ‘just say no’—well, I say that’s not realistic. I think you should ‘just say maybe,’ and then try to walk away from the drugs. It doesn’t make you look like a dork who says no. It just looks like you have something else to do.”

I thought that joke would immediately cement me in the pantheon of great edgy political comedians who also comment on the sociology of humanity—like Richard Pryor or George Carlin. I started to read it to my mom and she just looked at me. She put her
head in her hands, much like that gay hairdresser who’d had to shave my head. “Oh, Jennifah. That just isn’t funny.” I rolled my eyes and said, “Mom, you just don’t get it.” I stormed out of the house and got in the trusty white Oldsmobile and struck out for Cambridge, Massachusetts, and my first open mic in the back of a bar at the Green Street Grill. I was headed for my Brenda Walsh moment.

I swilled a few cheap glasses of merlot before I sat down on the stool onstage at the open mic. I drew a breath and got ready to tell my Nancy Reagan joke. I looked out at a bunch of people my age, waiting expectantly, actually listening before I’d even said anything. I could hear my mom’s voice: “Jennifah, that just isn’t funny.” I made myself laugh as I thought about my poor mom sitting in her recliner, tens of thousands of dollars poorer because she’d spent her life buying food, faux designer clothes, and cassette tapes for my two sisters and me, and this was how I was repaying her.

It made me laugh out loud. So I skipped my Nancy Reagan joke and I just told the audience that I was a college graduate who lived with my parents and my mother did not think I was funny. And then I started to impersonate my mom. I’d been imitating her since I was a kid around the house—but until now it never dawned on me to impersonate my mom in front of strangers. It was always more of an in-joke with my family.

I killed. I’m not bragging. All comedians do really well the first time they do stand-up comedy. I don’t know what it is—some cosmic/karmic free pass because what you’re doing is hard enough. But when you’re just starting out, you don’t know that all comics kill their first time—that’s why we stay comics. We think we’re special.

A few months later, my parents came to see me perform. Let’s just say there was another kitchen-table discussion—this time with my mom in tears. She didn’t understand why I was humiliating her in public and revealing family secrets. I tried to convince my mom that making jokes about how she pretends she’s not home when the annoying neighbor knocks on the door is not a “family secret.” My parents didn’t come back to see me perform and things were
definitely strained until my mother saw the Margaret Cho movie
I’m the One That I Want.
Margaret had proven herself to be a successful and famous comedian who also imitated her mother. Just like she came to accept Lauren Bacall’s sex life, she saw via Margaret’s documentary that comedians are actually honoring the ones they love when they make fun of them in their act. My mother not only gave me her seal of approval but also started to come to see me perform regularly so that she could watch the audiences laugh at . . .
her.
And just like Margaret’s mom, mine stuck around after the show to get attention from the crowds.

MY MOM HAS a really good singing voice. She’s part of a singing group—you may have heard of them, they’re called the Musettes. Oh, you haven’t heard of them? That’s probably because you don’t live in a senior citizens’ home. That’s where they tour. My mom plays piano and sings with three other women and leads them in a rousing (for those settled-down seniors) rendition of “Oh, We Ain’t Got a Barrel of Money.”

One of my mom’s favorite stories is that when she was a teenager she met Patti Page. I’ll spare anyone under forty who is reading this book the trip to Wikipedia. Patti Page is one of the biggest-selling female recording artists in history. She’s famous for songs like “Old Cape Cod” and “Mockin’ Bird Hill.” When my mom met Patti Page she told her that she wanted to be a singer like her someday, and Patti said to her, “You can be anything you want to be.”

That story always depressed me because by the time my mom relayed Patti’s words to me, I knew how it ended. Sure, my mom could have been anything she wanted to be, but she didn’t become a professional, Grammy-winning, popular American singer. Instead, she had three kids and raised them in a time when you couldn’t really just strap your kid into a stroller and pursue your dream of becoming a singer.
American Idol
hadn’t been invented yet.

I can’t imagine dreaming of wanting to be a singer, meeting my
idol, and getting her words of encouragement—and then getting married, having kids, and touring the blue-hair circuit. Luckily, my mom raised me using Patti Page’s insight “You can be anything you want to be,” and not “You can be anything you want to be but it probably won’t work out that way” or “You can be anything you want to be but also please still make time to be a mother and wife.”

Some of her friends have accused her of living vicariously through my show business life. I don’t see it that way. She’s definitely not a stage mother. My mom just always knew how much my career meant to me and she’s a realist. She doesn’t just blindly say, “You can have it all!”